Organizations often deploy multiple databases across a grid or datacenter to support various applications. Over time, an organization may upgrade or scale up a datacenter's servers, databases, and other underlying infrastructure to satisfy increased demands of the various applications or to support new applications. This growth may result in server sprawl, where excess servers are poorly utilized, difficult to manage, and consume valuable resources.
One approach system administrators use to mitigate server sprawl and to take advantage of upgraded infrastructure involves database consolidation. According to this approach, multiple databases are migrated to a fewer number of databases or database servers. Benefits of database consolidation may include, without limitation, minimizing wasted (idle) resources on servers, improving system manageability, reducing floor space and cooling demands in datacenters, and lessening the vulnerability of datacenters to security threats as a result of fewer actively deployed servers.
While there may be many benefits to database consolidation, the process can be complex and cumbersome. For example, the system administrator may have difficulty identifying destination databases or servers onto which multiple source databases can “fit”. Adding to the complexity, there may be organization-specific constraints based on location of the databases, lifecycle status, redundancy for failover, load-balancing demands, etc. Manually evaluating each consolidation option may take a lot of time and expertise. Furthermore, many of the decisions during consolidation planning may be subjective and dependent on user-intuition. If the administrator makes a poor planning decision, then database consolidation could suffer from poor performance, possibly affecting more systems than before consolidation.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.